Written on Tablets of Flesh (2007-2013) is trilogy of speculative essays, presented both as videos and as lecture performances. These works revolve around the human voice and its contradictory relationship to the body, to language, to music and to technology.

A Lecture on Schizophonia (2007-2011) uses the term schizophonia (=that which makes dogs bark at speakers, children look for the man behind the box and savages demand their captured souls returned), to investigate the split that appears when sound is separated from its source. The invention of the telephone and the phonograph at end of the nineteenth century marks a rupture in our experience of the human voice, which simultaneously fulfills a promise given by prophets and shamans since ancient times. Suddenly a voice can issue from out of nowhere, from the wrong mouth or from beyond the grave. Listening to our own voice, we experience ourselves as others.

The Third Man (2010) investigates the darker side of song; music as a parasite infecting humanity at some point in prehistory and propagating itself since then by jumping from body to body. Certain archaeologists believe that language developed from primeval men singing to each other. Song then becomes the first technology; the first time an alien structure infiltrates and takes control of the human brain. Song is also the first technology that each individual encounters in life.The mother’s singing voice works its way into the womb before any other conditioning of the child can take place.

The Third Man is a coproduction with the Impakt Foundation, Utrecht in the framework of Impakt Works 2010 and has been made possible with the support of the City of Utrecht; the Mondrian Foundation.

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The Girl Who Never Was (2013)
Single channel HD digital video and live lecture performance
Dur: 60 mins
colour, sound, 16:9

The Girl Who Never Was (2013) takes its starting point in the true story of an American researcher, who in 2008 rediscovers the lost traces of the first recorded voice ever: the one-hundred-and- forty-eight-years-old voice of a little girl singing the French lullaby Au Clair de la Lune. One year later another researcher experiments with the playback speed and manages to prove that what the fragment actually contains is the voice of a man. This exact same lullaby is the song sung by the artificial intelligence HAL in the French version of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. As HAL dies his voice also performs precisely the same glissando as the voice of the non-existent girl: a high-strung, insistent voice is gradually slowed down into a deep, sleepy and harmless one. The work uses these two voices as coordinates, and explores how a particular insistency, pertaining to the voice alone, makes it the vehicle for certain kinds of inexistences, as they make their way into our world. The more we try to shut them out, the more persistent their song becomes.

The Girl Who Never Was is a coproduction with the Impakt Foundation, Utrecht in the framework of Impakt Works 2013 and has been made possible with the support of the City of Utrecht; the Mondrian Foundation.

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Erik Bünger is a Swedish artist, composer and writer living in Berlin. His work revolves around the human voice and its contradictory relationship to the body, to language, to music and to technology. The voice is not addressed as a phenomenon, which gives rise to personal, human presence and interpersonal communication but rather as the very thing that allows something other, radically inhuman, to enter and take control of the human body.

Written on Tablets of Flesh (2007-2013) is trilogy of speculative essays, presented both as videos and as lecture performances. These works revolve around the human voice and its contradictory relationship to the body, to language, to music and to technology.

A Lecture on Schizophonia (2007-2011) uses the term schizophonia (=that which makes dogs bark at speakers, children look for the man behind the box and savages demand their captured souls returned), to investigate the split that appears when sound is separated from its source. The invention of the telephone and the phonograph at end of the nineteenth century marks a rupture in our experience of the human voice, which simultaneously fulfills a promise given by prophets and shamans since ancient times. Suddenly a voice can issue from out of nowhere, from the wrong mouth or from beyond the grave. Listening to our own voice, we experience ourselves as others.

The Third Man (2010) investigates the darker side of song; music as a parasite infecting humanity at some point in prehistory and propagating itself since then by jumping from body to body. Certain archaeologists believe that language developed from primeval men singing to each other. Song then becomes the first technology; the first time an alien structure infiltrates and takes control of the human brain. Song is also the first technology that each individual encounters in life.The mother’s singing voice works its way into the womb before any other conditioning of the child can take place.

The Third Man is a coproduction with the Impakt Foundation, Utrecht in the framework of Impakt Works 2010 and has been made possible with the support of the City of Utrecht; the Mondrian Foundation.

–

The Girl Who Never Was (2013)
Single channel HD digital video and live lecture performance
Dur: 60 mins
colour, sound, 16:9

The Girl Who Never Was (2013) takes its starting point in the true story of an American researcher, who in 2008 rediscovers the lost traces of the first recorded voice ever: the one-hundred-and- forty-eight-years-old voice of a little girl singing the French lullaby Au Clair de la Lune. One year later another researcher experiments with the playback speed and manages to prove that what the fragment actually contains is the voice of a man. This exact same lullaby is the song sung by the artificial intelligence HAL in the French version of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. As HAL dies his voice also performs precisely the same glissando as the voice of the non-existent girl: a high-strung, insistent voice is gradually slowed down into a deep, sleepy and harmless one. The work uses these two voices as coordinates, and explores how a particular insistency, pertaining to the voice alone, makes it the vehicle for certain kinds of inexistences, as they make their way into our world. The more we try to shut them out, the more persistent their song becomes.

The Girl Who Never Was is a coproduction with the Impakt Foundation, Utrecht in the framework of Impakt Works 2013 and has been made possible with the support of the City of Utrecht; the Mondrian Foundation.

–

Erik Bünger is a Swedish artist, composer and writer living in Berlin. His work revolves around the human voice and its contradictory relationship to the body, to language, to music and to technology. The voice is not addressed as a phenomenon, which gives rise to personal, human presence and interpersonal communication but rather as the very thing that allows something other, radically inhuman, to enter and take control of the human body.